Chris Mooney is everywhere. He just left La Jolla and Mountain View and he's in Portland. No he's not there anymore but he's coming back, after Seattle and before Madison and Raleigh. We saw him in the Haight, San Francisco, CA, when we were running errands. It was a little random. We had wended our way through the retro t-shirt shops and gutter punks who dye their snarled hair black to offset their blue eyes, the better with which to beseech you for money. Others asked for cigarettes...lights...change, with sleeping Rottweiller puppies chained to their sides and their appendages pierced with chains and pieces of washing machines and whatnot -- testaments to their pain and angst. We passed the tattoo parlors and stores with the incense and the 60's clothes from India and more gutter punks who chain-stitched crocheted scarves, perhaps for the upcoming winter and ongoing rebellion. This is the laid back pace of Haight street, where the clerks are a prouder, higher caste of punks, ordained to the chore of letting the masses know just how uncool they are. Fortunately, the clerks are most indignant about the gutter punks who should "just go back to their parents houses in Marin" or "get a job spraying deodorant in used shoes" -- at one of the many worn-out jean emporiums. Those are some highlights of the Haight - the craziness of the scene ebbs and flows. So with our errands checked off and our yen for hippy dippy punky Haight fulfilled, we ducked into a bookstore called The Booksmith, a clean, ambient, also well-lighted store, that's not a chain and not so much a scene. We wandered back to rows of folding metal chairs. They were testing the mike. Chris Mooney was scheduled to speak in 5 minutes.
So coincidental, I initially thought, since I had just read the book The Republican War on Science, and since Haight (though not the store) seemed like an unlikely venue. But it's not such a coincidence, since Chris Mooney is all over the place. Ubiquitous might be too strong a word, but, like Starbucks, he turns up everywhere, especially at adjacent corners of streets where you're likely to find liberal minded people convening to think the right things about political influence on the environment, evolution and other pertinent science fields. The Haight might not so easily fit this image, but The Booksmith, one of the few independent stores left in the city, certainly does.
The Republican War on Science covers the history and background of some big issues in public policy and science in detail. The introductory paragraphs of each chapter are especially catchy. If you happen to have been following this for the last 15 or 20 years (or more) you will be in familiar terrain, perhaps you will flip through and nod your head. If you are interested in the details they are all there. If you've followed other areas of science and public policy such as some of international development issues, especially around health, the tensions and compromises described will also be familiar. To the majority of people, and scientists, this book will be eye-opening. I think it's timely and important, as it shows the government's sometimes underated capacity to influence science (and other things) for better or for worse. Its easy to take for granted a government's ability to beneficially influence science. This book heightens awareness of our current opportunity to watch government's detrimental (at least that's our view) hand in science. Good, thorough reviews of the hard cover edition are here and here and here.
Mooney has apparently updated this paperback edition to address his audiences' burning question- "what can we do?". What can we do about problems like Republicans 'hijacking' good science and contorting it to promote bad policy, about media's banal coverage of science, about politicians who are uninformed, about the preponderance of political appointees. Happily it was a full to capacity crowd who sat at the edge of every available seat and were passionate about these issues.
They all wanted to participate in the answers and the question of 'what can we do?' . Of course many times people ask "what can I do", but what they mean is, "what can I do that doesn't take much time, that doesn't cost anything, that doesn't cause me discomfort, that appeals to my lifestyle, philosophy and religious convictions, where I can get credit for doing something? People are more likely to deny what they can do when they're asked to contribute. However this was a sincere, well-intentioned crowd. Some people had traveled great distances to see him speak.
Chris Mooney offered some suggestions in his talk to this perplexing question, and I will mention a few of them -- I'm sure there are others in the new edition of the book. The author said scientists should more actively engage the public and venture forth in public controversies. The valuable Office of Technology Assessment OTA should be reopened. Politicians shouldn't use junk science to defend policy. There should be fewer political appointees in science leadership positions. Journalists shouldn't cover stories in a such a rote fashion, they should stop trying to balance science to suit the business demands of the papers. Someone said the problem was bigger then science. Another person suggested that more scientists should become politicians. Mooney said that having a few less lawyers wouldn't hurt. We would say that many scientists have some hurdles to overcome before becoming politicians, but they could always send a pledge sheet around their lab, right after the one raising money for the post-doc doing the marathon for cancer or the triathlon for the natural disaster victims.
The subject of the book is focused, as was the talk, on the the political efforts of the government to denigrate good science and invite speculation about methods and process, while at the same time courting dubious science, and framing the debates and science discussions to support their own agendas. Complicating the question "what can we do", however, is the fact that while you can try to narrow the subject to 'political attacks on science', this is really a vast topic, in fact it's not really one topic, but many. As well, you can even widen the scope of these issues to a set of broader perfect circumstances that have influenced the problems, such as a lack of general knowledge and passion about science combined with overwhelming technological advances in science; an erosion of institutions that used to assure certain traditions of science funding and integrity, with a demonically business oriented government. In this perspective, everything can get swept into the discussion.
Education for instance, plays a role in forming peoples' ability to reason scientifically, it can help them judge the rhetoric of politicians, and advocate for better policies. A graduate assistant attendee asked what they could do to help. Teach, Mooney exhorted, luckily your at Berkeley, he added (education was not the main focus). Certainly all the problems in education and science ennui don't start at the college level but college science curricula often do a lousy job at encouraging lifelong interest in science. One deceptively simple suggestion is to assure that the students don't end up loathing science. Could this effect political outcomes? We're not as worried about A level students, the ones you want to have in your lab under the auspices of a Howard Hughes grant, but the bell curve is tyrannous to the others. It precludes the majority of them from acing *Science 101* and if those students get a Cs,Ds, or Fs in biology will they hate biology for the rest of their lives? Will they say, as one student recently did "I hated this class. The teacher taught entirely from PowerPoints. You don't need to go to class because it's all in the book. The mean grade in the class was 30/100. I'm done with biology" Or will they say, as another student did, "I got a mediocre grade, but I loved the class! This guy genuinely loves biology and the challenges students present, and he made me appreciate the subject". You can peruse on-line rating sites like RateMyProfessor.com to quickly learn that among the outlier posts, teachers can literally, make or break a student's experience.
Will the "non-scientists" exit class after finals and forever shun science and scientists? Will they look for the simplest solutions even though those may be motivated solely by politics and may be scientifically unsound? Will those students make financial investments in industries that are deleterious to the environment? Will they vote for candidates who waver on their science votes, who are influenced by the base? Not everyone will master the Kreb's cycle in their freshman science class. But don't scorn or alienate those who don't, they may be casting a vote on your behalf someday. Science education is certainly beyond the scope of the book. The solutions are elusive. Various aspects of teaching -- the competing goals of teaching and research, the budgeting that effects lab curricula, the attrition rate of promising students to other fields, and the near impossibilty of altering the curriculm make this an unwieldy as well as tangential subject. But Al Gore was apparently inspired as an undergraduate to care about the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere. Others will be similarly influenced.
One person asked: If we work in discipline that isn't political, but it is still written about by the press in a skewed way, what can we do? In brief the author advised: write to the editor, talk to the journalists, correct the record when the facts are misconstrued. We would add that if you take a broader view of "politics", there is no part of science where politics doesn't apply. That goes for business and economics too. If your field is that obscure, than undoubtedly much of your time will be spent justifying your existence. Oh, no? Has your funding been cut yet? That's political. That's business. Has the doctor who sits on the board of the foundation that funds your obscure area of science asked you if his son can work in your lab this summer in turn for a reference? That's political. Is your lab housed in the windowless seismically incorrect cellar of a Cold War era building with peeling paint and nasty pale green cinder block walls, while across the street they're building a state of the art business school or stem cell research facility? Did the CEO of your pharmaceutical company just get ousted over a patent controversy, and does the new one think your "product" (the one that you just invested the last five years of your life in) is a market loser? Do you work in the oil industry to pay your bills although your passion and PhD are in conservation geology? Are you a science PhD working at a non-profit in a city where your hourly salary is approximately one-tenth of what your hairdresser earns? It's not only stem cell research that is affected by business and politics and economics, all of science is. It has to be, economics, politics, business (religion) are enmeshed in our society.
But while these problems may be shared among different areas of science we defy anyone to come up with *a* solution. While Mooney's themes all fit neatly under the "Republican War On Science" umbrella at first, once you delve beyond a casual familiarity with any particular issue or shift the focus away from the broader underlying problems, the generalization doesn't provide a framework sufficient to understand the complexity of the political and economic difficulties facing science. Regardless of the overlap, each issue will need its own panoply of solutions because each has a unique set of challenges. In this regard Mooney acknowledges that the problems need to be tackled individually.
As we all know, and we have discussed here, the motivations that drive Intelligent Design proponents are not what drive the denial of global warming. Stem cell research will likely be privatized, and the fact that the government isn't contributing to the funding, growth and regulation of that industry will have different implications than the government's failure to acknowledge global warming, and its subservience to oil companies.One could argue that both of these decisions are guided by liberal ideology and that the science will always be forced to yield to more powerful interests. The government won't hinder the economic progress of the oil companies, nor will it fund research that clashes with the Republican religious base, but it won't often stand in the way of private corporate interests that might fund stem cell research. In this view, although The Republican War on Science slogan still holds a certain allure, the Bush administration has not so much waged a war on science, as it has pursued an agenda that inflicts collateral damage on science. The business interests that the current administration turns cartwheels for will still be there when the Democratics manage to regain power. Importantly though, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science raises awareness about these important and interesting issues, and it's good for us that he's on tour to promote these ideas. Here's a link to the book.
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Acronym Required covers these topics frequently. Articles such as "Big Labels, Little Science", and Sea Change or Littoral Disaster touch on some issues, as well as others, especially those in our Science and the Media, and Public Policy Higher Education and Environment, Public Health, as well as other sections.
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